I have written this piece for Slate. It begins:

Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 99, was a reliable and important voice on issues of voting rights and election law. Most famously, Stevens wrote an impassioned dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision to stop the Florida recount in the 2000 case Bush v. Gore, saying that doing so would cast a cloud over the legitimacy of George W. Bush’s election. He also wrote a lengthy—if somewhat meandering—dissent in the court’s 2010 Citizens United decision allowing unlimited corporate spending supporting or opposing candidates for election. And he wrote a strong dissent in the 1997 case, Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party, a less well-known case about “fusion voting.” If Stevens had his way in that case, it would have empowered minor political parties and at the same time made them less likely to be spoilers between major party candidates.

But there is one case that serves as a partial blemish on Stevens’ commendable voting rights record, his 2008 opinion in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, upholding Indiana’s strict voter identification law. The justice wrote an opinion for himself, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justice Anthony Kennedy, holding that such a law was supported by the government’s interest in preventing voter fraud and instilling voter confidence, even though Indiana could come forward with not a single case of voter fraud in the state’s history that would have been stopped by the law, and there was no evidence such laws actually bolster such confidence.